“I want you to not look away the second I walk into a room, to?—”
“Maybe I can’t do that!” She shifted to her side and pressed a finger into his chest. “Maybe it’s hard enough to do my job with you walking around in your damn shirt and tie with your messy shadow-creating hair, so I distract myself!”
“You distract yourself? Because you hate my hair?”
Jenna growled in frustration. “No Gentry, I distract myself because I can’t stop staring at your damn hair! I can’t stop thinking about the fact that you still have that old T-shirt or that you still buy raspberry chocolate, and then you go and give Curtis that two dollar bill? It’s like you’re trying to torture me.”
A low buzz sounded in Country’s ears. “Like you still have the keychain I gave you, and yet you didn't even look me up when you moved back to Calgary? You told me you couldn’t do the long distance thing?—”
“It was never about the long distance!” She pressed her hand against his chest, grabbing onto his sweatshirt and pulling in frustration.
“Then what was it about?” He pushed up, his elbows biting into the metal ridges of the truck bed, not realizing his face would end up centimetres from Jenna’s. “I was all in, you know that, right? You were the one that pulled away, and I don’t know what I did wrong. I don’t know how I ruined?—”
Jenna didn’t let him finish the sentence. Before he could process what was happening, her lips were on his, and he was sinking back against the blanket, pulling her with him.
Chapter Nineteen
Had she done this? Jenna didn’t remember choosing to kiss Gentry, but there she was, sprawled over him, her lips moving against his as his arms wrapped around her for the second time that night.
Her whole body vibrated like violin strings as his fingers pressed into her back, the taste of her mint lip balm finding its way to her tongue from his. You. Her heart unlocked like a diary, recognizing the key it had been waiting for all these years.
No, no, no. Recovering from leaving Country the first time had been like collecting beads from a snapped bracelet over gravel. She’d never found all the pieces, and yet she couldn’t force herself to stop.
He traced his tongue over the seam of her lips, and she felt his intake of breath before she heard it. Country put his hand behind her head and rolled her to her back, then dropped his leg between hers. His weight on her body was intoxicating. Jenna twisted her fists in his fleece, pulling it tight across his back, and arched into him. He dragged his lips across her jaw and kissed down the side of her throat while her blood felt like it was pushing through the kink in a garden hose.
She had to stop. Even though she’d been the one to start this, she had to stop and tell him the truth before he put his hands on any more of her skin, or she was going to have sex with him right here in the back of his truck while their friends sat in wooden chairs around the corner.
“What’s wrong?” Country whispered.
Jenna’s eyes flew open. He was there, hovering over her. She didn’t realize how much she’d tensed up until she let out a breath. Now. She had to say it now. "There's something I have to tell you." Her voice was ragged, and Country pulled back a little farther, working to catch his breath.
There was no way to ease into this. Jenna's hands softened as she stared up into his eyes, the faint glow from the back patio etching his face in greyscale. "I have Turner Syndrome, Gentry."
His brows furrowed. "What?"
She meant to drop her hands from his shoulders, but instead, they traced down his sides and settled on his waist. "I found out a few days before I called you from Windsor. I went in to get tested for the genetic markers for breast cancer because of my mom, and then I got the results—" Tears welled up in her eyes again as she opened the gasket on thirteen years of shame and secrets. They dropped onto her skin, rolling straight back into her hair.
Jenna thought back to the weeks before they'd broken up. She'd told him she was getting tested. They'd been talking about her mom's diagnosis for a month at least, and that had been one of the first questions he'd asked her when they'd talked.
Country’s frown deepened. "You said you didn't have the markers."
Jenna nodded, her throat working. "I didn't. I don't have the markers for breast cancer."
"But you had something else?" he asked. She squeezed her eyes shut, and he wiped her tears with his thumb. "Jenna . . ."
"Turner Syndrome means I'm missing an X chromosome. My ovaries aren't developed. It's why I'm small and why I never knew when I was going to get my period."
Country rolled off her, settling next to her side. "I don't understand. Why didn't you tell me? I could've?—"
"It means I can't have kids."
That seemed to knock the air out of him. I can't have kids. The phrase appeared in her head in white Arial font like they fed to Glen on the teleprompter. Each word sank around them like a newspaper dropped on a puddle, hovering until they were saturated then sinking to the bottom.
The last month of their relationship snapped into startling clarity. The last time he’d been in Windsor and they’d sat at her kitchen table with toast and scrambled eggs. How he’d told her he couldn’t wait until their life could be that way every day.
How she’d said hockey might get in the way of their plans, and how he’d explained that all he wanted was a family with her. Didn’t matter when or where it was. The picture he’d shown her of a farmhouse with white siding and a wraparound porch.
Country’s voice shook when he spoke. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
